Higher education institutions worldwide have begun to embrace sustainability issues and engage their campuses and communities in such efforts, which have led to the development of integrity and ethical values in these organizations and their relationships with stakeholders. This study provides a literary review of the concept of University Social Responsibility (USR) and sustainability programs worldwide, grouped into eight research streams: conceptual framework, strategic planning and USR, educating on USR, spreading USR, reporting and USR, evaluation of USR, barriers and accelerators (...) and case studies. The aforementioned research streams served as a context to explore best practices in sustainability on a global basis. (shrink)

Sustainable development is a concern for countries, businesses and organizations sensitive to excess in terms of utilized resources. This is evident in international initiatives which aim to establish guiding principles for institutions to follow regarding what is considered to be socially responsible behavior, allowing for assessment and the identification of objectives. As higher education institutions, colleges and universities have a public responsibility to generate and transmit knowledge to society as a whole, as well as an economic and social responsibility regarding (...) resource management; hence the importance of specifically analyzing their socially responsible behavior. This paper introduces an initiative which has been implemented in the United States and Canada; one of its aims is to identify best practices in this field and obtain knowledge that allows for the creation and development of a guide to social responsibility adapted specifically to higher education institutions. The Sustainability Tracking, Assessment & Rating System (STARS) is an innovative initiative developed by the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education (AASHE), in which all higher education institutions in the United States and Canada are welcome to participate. Their analysis will allow us to determine which measurable aspects will become a part of the sustainability culture that is developing in the higher education institutions that participate in this initiative. Furthermore, it will allow us to highlight the ethical values that are being promoted among its special interest groups. (shrink)

Liberty: Individualism and state control in general. Competition. Contract. Comparative survey of theories.--Property: Introduction. Theories of private property. Collectivist and socialist theories. Functional and social trust theories. Review of modern trends.--Succession.--Family: Biological and social basis of the family. Modern problems.--Punishment.

Muchos autores que se han ocupado de la autonomía personal parecen identificar la capacidad de autonomía esencialmente con la capacidad de todo agente racional para identificar preferencias y tomar decisiones conforme a las mismas. Estos autores -entre los que podríamos ubicar a C. Nino- prescinden a menudo de ulteriores elementos o condiciones para su ejercicio. Sin embargo, resulta fundamental ahondar en esos aspectos a veces pasados por alto; ahondar principalmente en las opciones y el proceso de formación de preferencias de (...) los agentes, para delinear mejor los aspectos normativos de la autonomía. En este trabajo propongo recuperar un elemento central del concepto que ha sido extensamente desarrollado en la literatura feminista, me refiero al contexto de relaciones que ha dado lugar a la llamada "autonomía relacional". Propongo incorporar esta noción al núcleo conceptual de la autonomía sin renunciar, sin embargo, a otros elementos del concepto entre los que destacaré las "opciones relevantes", es decir, la presencia de cursos de acción, de oportunidades, que la persona es capaz de reconocer como propuestas no solo viables sino legítimas para sí. Para desarrollar esta idea comenzaré por definir la autonomía a través de los que considero los elementos o condiciones centrales del concepto, deteniéndome especialmente en la condición de opciones relevantes. A continuación se abordará la cuestión relativa al modo en que las opciones se perfilan, se construyen y son percibidas por los sujetos. En este punto el estudio se fijará específicamente en el entorno contextual y de relaciones que sirve de trasfondo para la construcción de las opciones, para proponer la noción de opciones relacionales. Many authors have written about autonomy focusing mainly on the capacity of the autonomous agent for identifying preferences and making decisions. These authors -C. Nino among them- do not take into consideration further elements or conditions for being autonomous. However, it is necessary to take other aspects into consideration; mainly it is important to take account of both options and the building of the agent’s preferences. This way, autonomy normative aspects will be better understood. I propose here to analyse the concept of "relational autonomy", which has been largely elaborated within feminist theory. My aim is to incorporate relations and options to the core of the concept of personal autonomy. In this article, I will define personal autonomy first, highlighting the importance of relevant options. Second, I will describe the way options are built and their perception by the agent. Finally, I will focus on the context and relations on the background, and I will propose the notion of relational options. (shrink)

Aristotle bequeathed to us a powerful metaphysical picture, of substances in which properties inhere. The picture has turned out to be highly problematic in many ways; but it is nevertheless a picture not easy to dislodge. Less obvious are the normative tones implicit in the picture and the way these permeate our system of values, especially when thinking of ourselves and our ambitions, hopes and fears. These have proved, if anything, even harder to dislodge than the metaphysical picture which supports (...) them. This paper first draws out the ethics suggested by a conception of being as individual substances, and finds both inner tensions among these values—expressed in divergent characteristics in the history of philosophy—and a neglect of a significant set of values. Substance metaphysics prefers freedom, independence and autonomy over relational and reciprocal values, which can even be regarded as existentially threatening. A prominent attempt to accommodate both sorts of values without eschewing substantialist metaphysics is briefly considered, before turning to examine an alternative metaphysics and the values it implies. A metaphysics which takes being as becoming, it is argued, supports an ethics centred on relational values, and their associated virtues of care. (shrink)

The increasing demand for transparency in AI has recently come under scrutiny. The question is often posted in terms of “epistemic double standards”, and whether the standards for transparency in AI ought to be higher than, or equivalent to, our standards for ordinary human reasoners. I agree that the push for increased transparency in AI deserves closer examination, and that comparing these standards to our standards of transparency for other opaque systems is an appropriate starting point. I suggest that a (...) more fruitful exploration of this question will involve a different comparison class. We routinely treat judgments made by highly trained experts in specialized fields as fair or well-grounded even though—by the nature of expert/layperson division of epistemic labor—an expert will not be able to provide an explanation of the reasoning behind these judgments that makes sense to most other people. Regardless, laypeople are thought to be acting reasonably—and ethically—in deferring to the judgments of experts that concern their areas of specialization. I suggest that we reframe our question regarding the appropriate standards of transparency in AI as one that asks when, why, and to what degree it would be ethical to accept opacity in AI. I argue that our epistemic relation to certain opaque AI technology may be relevantly similar to the layperson’s epistemic relation to the expert in certain respects, such that the successful expert/layperson division of epistemic labor can serve as a blueprint for the ethical use of opaque AI. (shrink)

Moral understanding is a species of knowledge. Understanding why an action is wrong, for example, amounts to knowing why the action is wrong. The claim that moral understanding is immune to luck while moral knowledge is not does not withstand scrutiny; nor does the idea that there is something deep about understanding for there are different degrees of understanding. It is also mistaken to suppose that grasping is a distinct psychological state that accompanies understanding. To understand why something is the (...) case is to grasp or see why something is the case and grasping and seeing are ways of knowing. (shrink)

It is commonly maintained that neuroplastic mechanisms in the brain provide empirical support for the hypothesis of multiple realizability. We show in various case studies that neuroplasticity stems from preexisting mechanisms and processes inherent in the neural structure of the brain. We argue that not only does neuroplasticity fail to provide empirical evidence of multiple realization, its inability to do so strengthens the mind-body identity theory. Finally, we argue that a recently proposed identity theory called Flat Physicalism can be enlisted (...) to explain the current state of the mind-body problem more adequately. (shrink)

This article uses recent work in philosophy of science and social epistemology to argue for a shift in analytic philosophy of religion from a knowledge-centric epistemology to an epistemology centered on understanding. Not only can an understanding-centered approach open up new avenues for the exploration of largely neglected aspects of the religious life, it can also shed light on how religious participation might be epistemically valuable in ways that knowledge-centered approaches fail to capture. Further, it can create new opportunities for (...) interaction with neighboring disciplines and can help us revitalize and transform stagnant debates in philosophy of religion, while simultaneously allowing for the introduction and recovery of marginalized voices and traditions. (shrink)

Microbiome science asserts humans are made up of more microbial cells and genes than human ones, and that each person harbors their own unique microbial population. Human microbiome studies gesture toward the post-racial aspirations of personalized medicine—characterizing states of human health and illness microbially. By viewing humans as “supraorganisms” made up of millions of microbial partners, some microbiome science seems to disrupt binding historical categories often grounded in racist biology, allowing interspeciality to supersede race. But inevitably, unexamined categories of race (...) and ethnicity surface in a myriad of studies on microbiota. This paper approaches race as a ghost variable across microbiome research and asks, what is race doing in studies of the microbiome? Why is it there, and how is it functioning? I examine this research to argue that social scientists must work with biological scientists to help put microbial differences into perspective—to investigate how microbiomes and race are entangled embodiments of the social, environmental, and biological. Ultimately, transdisciplinary collaboration is required to address racial health disparities in microbiome research without reifying race as a straightforward biological or social designation. (shrink)

Medieval and early modern devotional works rarely receive serious treatment from philosophers, even those working in the subfields of philosophy of religion or the history of ideas. In this article, I examine one medieval devotional work in particular—the Middle High German image- and verse-program, Christus und die minnende Seele (CMS)—and I argue that it can plausibly be viewed as a form of medieval public philosophy, one that both exhibited and encouraged philosophical innovation. I address a few objections to my proposal—namely, (...) that CMS is neither public enough nor that it counts as proper philosophy—and I attempt to defend CMS’s public philosophical credentials in light of these objections. I conclude with a brief discussion of how devotional texts like CMS can help us do innovative public philosophy today. (shrink)

This chapter aims to reconstruct the philosophical motivation for the pudgalavāda or “Personalist” Buddhist view that the person is ultimately real. It argues that the ultraminimalism of the Abhidharma is too minimal to account for crucial features of personhood—especially its capacity to construct unities out of pluralities. The Buddhist Personalist insists that the individuation of person-constituting continua must be an ultimately real fact, not something we project onto or construct out of ultimate reality. That certain ultimate particulars really do belong (...) together, in a way they do not belong to other dharmas with which they may stand in causal-conditional relations, is a position not readily articulated within the Abhidharma metaphysical framework—yet the Pudgalavādin will not reject this framework, for it is only the person, and not other complex wholes, that must be ultimately real. (shrink)

Development of Buddhist thought in India; 1. The Buddha’s suffering; 2. Practice and theory of no-self; 3. Kleśas and compassion; 4. The second Buddha’s greater vehicle; 5. Karmic questions; 6. Irresponsible selves, responsible non-selves; 7. The third turning: Yogācāra; 8. The long sixth to seventh century: epistemology as ethics; I. Perception and conception: the changing face ofultimate reality; II. Evaluating reasons: Naiyāyikas and Diṅnāga. III. Madhyamaka response to Yogācāra IV. Percepts and concepts: Apoha 1 ; V. Efficacy: Apoha 2 ; (...) VI. The path of the Bodhisattva; Epilogue; Background information; Appendix 1: The languages of Buddhism; Appendix 2: Intellectual context; Appendix 3: The Abhidharma. (shrink)

ABSTRACTEffects of metaphorical framing of political issues on opinion have been studied widely by two approaches: a critical-discourse approach and a response-elicitation approach. The current article reports a systematic literature review that examines whether these approaches report converging or diverging effects. We compared CDA and REA on the metaphorical frames that were studied and their reported effects. Results show that the CDA frames are typically more negative, nonfictional, and extreme than REA frames. Reported effects in CDA and REA studies differ (...) in terms of presence, directionality, and strength, with CDA typically reporting strong effects in line with the frame, compared to REA. These differences in effects can be explained by the different frame characteristics. However, differences in the methods applied by CDA and REA could be responsible for these differences as well. In all, we conclude that the research field is fragmented on the impact of metaphors in politics. (shrink)

Noninvasive prenatal testing promises to enhance women's reproductive autonomy by providing genetic information about the fetus, especially in the detection of genetic impairments like Down syndrome. In practice, however, NIPT provides opportunities for intensified manipulation and control over women's reproductive decisions. Applying Miranda Fricker's concept of epistemic injustice to prenatal screening, this article analyzes how medical professionals impair reproductive decision-making by perpetuating testimonial injustice. They do so by discrediting positive parental testimony about what it is like to raise a child (...) with DS. We argue that this testimonial injustice constitutes a twofold harm: people with DS and their family members who claim that parenting a child with DS may be a rewarding and joyous experience are harmed when they are systematically silenced, disbelieved, and/or denied epistemic credibility by medical professionals, and pregnant women are harmed since they might make poorly informed choices without access to all relevant information. The broader implication of the analysis is that epistemic justice is a precondition of reproductive autonomy. We conclude by calling for federal oversight of the acquisition and dissemination of information that prospective parents receive following a positive diagnosis of DS to ensure that it is comprehensive and up to date. (shrink)

This Element looks at religious experience and the role it has played in philosophy of religion. It critically explores the history of the intertwined discourses on mysticism and religious experience, before turning to a few specific discussions within contemporary philosophy of religion. One debate concerns the question of perennialism vs. constructivism and whether there is a 'common core' to all religious or mystical experience independent of interpretation or socio-historical background. Another central discussion concerns the epistemology of purportedly theophanic experience and (...) whether a perceptual model of religious experience can provide evidence or justification for theistic belief. The Element concludes with a discussion of how philosophy of religion can productively widen its treatment of religious experience in the service of creating a more inclusive and welcoming discipline. (shrink)

Despite advances in feminism, the "law of the father" remains the dominant model of Western psychological and cultural analysis, and the law of the mother continues to exist as an underdeveloped and marginal concept. In her radical rereading of the Greek myth, _Oresteia_, Amber Jacobs hopes to rectify the occlusion of the mother and reinforce her role as an active agent in the laws that determine and reinforce our cultural organization. According to Greek myth, Metis, Athena's mother, was Zeus's (...) first wife. Zeus swallowed Metis to prevent her from bearing children who would overthrow him. Nevertheless, Metis bore Zeus a child-Athena-who sprang forth fully formed from his head. In Aeschylus's _Oresteia_, Athena's motherless status functions as a crucial justification for absolving Orestes of the crime of matricide. In his defense of Orestes, Zeus argues that the father is more important than the mother, using Athena's "motherless" birth as an example. Conducting a close reading of critical works on Aeschylus's text, Jacobs reveals that psychoanalytic theorists have unwittingly reproduced the denial of Metis in their own critiques. This repression, which can be found in the work of Sigmund Freud and Melanie Klein as well as in the work of more contemporary theorists such as André Green and Luce Irigaray, has resulted in both an incomplete analysis of Oresteia and an inability to account for the fantasies and unconscious processes that fall outside the oedipal/patricidal paradigm. By bringing the story of Athena's mother, Metis, to the forefront, Jacobs challenges the primacy of the Oedipus myth in Western culture and psychoanalysis and introduces a bold new theory of matricide and maternal law. She finds that the Metis myth exists in cryptic forms within Aeschylus's text, uncovering what she terms the "latent content of the Oresteian myth," and argues that the occlusion of the law of the mother is proof of the patriarchal structures underlying our contemporary social and psychic realities. Jacobs's work not only provides new insight into the Oresteian trilogy but also advances a postpatriarchal model of the symbolic order that has strong ramifications for psychoanalysis, feminism, and theories of representation, as well as for clinical practice and epistemology. (shrink)

Socrates’ claim that pleasure is a γένεσις unifies the Philebus’ conception of pleasure. Close examination of the passage reveals an emphasis on metaphysical-normative dependency in γένεσις. Seeds for such an emphasis were sown in the dialogue’s earlier discussion of μεικτά, thus linking the γένεσις claim to Philebus’ description of pleasure as ἄπειρον. False pleasures illustrate the radical dependency of pleasure on outside determinants. I end tying together the Philebus’ three descriptions of pleasure: restoration, indefinite, and γένεσις.

We analyze the environmental implications of basic income programs through literature review, government documents, pilot studies, and interviews eliciting expert knowledge. We consider existing knowledge and then use a grounded approach to produce theory on the relationship between a basic income guarantee and environmental protection/damage. We find that very little empirical or theoretical work has been done on this relationship and that theoretical arguments can be made for both positive and negative environmental impacts. Ultimately, this implies, the environmental impact of (...) a basic income program will be dependent on program design. These insights allow us to generate a toolkit of policy proposals to assist in the development of green basic income programs via either conditions, additions, or complements. (shrink)

In the Timaeus , plants are granted soul, and specifically the sort of soul capable of perception and desire. Also in the Timaeus , perception requires the involvement of to phronimon . It seems it must follow that plants are intelligent. I argue that we can neither avoid granting plants sensation in just this sense, nor can we suppose that ` to phronimon ' is something devoid of intelligence. Indeed, plants must be related to intelligence, if they are to be (...) both orderly and good. Plants must have individual souls if they are to be distinguished from each other, each with an orderly life; but the intelligence their perceptions require is not similarly individuated, for their ultimate good is only derivative: it is only as completing the body of the cosmos that plants are good things. Plants have their own perceptions and desires in virtue of the intelligence ordering the cosmos as a whole. (shrink)

Scholars have long speculated about what a future affected by gene editing technologies might hold. This article enters current debates over the future of gene editing and the place of disability within it. Specifically, I evaluate contemporary utopian thinking about gene editing found in two different schools of thought: transhumanism and critical disability studies, ultimately judging the latter to be richer and more politically promising than the former. If we take it as our goal to protect and promote future people’s (...) autonomy interests, I argue that current political efforts should be directed toward modifying ableist environments rather than employing genetic technologies to avoid disability or enhance capacity. The article concludes by drawing from disability justice scholarship to make the case that the “right to an open future” should be understood as the “right to an accessible future,” one wherein society is “open” to people with diverse genetic traits and capacities. (shrink)

More than two decades after the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act , people with disabilities continue to live at the margins of American democracy and capitalist society. This persistent exclusion poses a conundrum to political theorists committed to disability rights, multiculturalism, and social justice. Drawing from feminist insights, specifically the work of Nancy Fraser, among others, I examine the necessary conditions for meaningful inclusion to be realized within a deliberative democracy. Using Fraser's concept of “participatory parity” as a (...) proxy for inclusion, I strategize how to overcome informal barriers—economic inequality and misrecognition—that persist even after disabled people are granted the legal right to participate. The analysis concludes that a truly inclusionary and multicultural democracy requires the redistribution of wealth and a more expansive model of political deliberation, one that can recognize unconventional modes of communication through practices of translation. (shrink)

Infants are sensitive to statistical regularities (i.e., transitional probabilities, or TPs) relevant to segmenting words in fluent speech. However, there is debate about whether tracking TPs results in representations of possible words. Infants show preferential learning of sequences with high TPs (HTPs) as object labels relative to those with low TPs (LTPs). Such findings could mean that only the HTP sequences have a word‐like status, and they are more readily mapped to a referent for that reason. But these findings could (...) also suggest that HTP sequences are easier to encode, just like any other predictable sequence. Here we aimed to distinguish between these explanations. To do so, we built on findings that infants become resistant to learning labels that are not typical of their native language as they approach 2 years of age and add words to their lexicons. If tracking TPs in speech results in identifying candidate words, at this age TPs may have reduced power to confer lexical status when they yield a unit that is very dissimilar to word forms that are typical of infants’ native language. Indeed, we found that at 20 months, English‐learning infants with relatively small vocabularies learned HTP Italian words (but not LTP words) as object labels, while infants with larger vocabularies resisted learning HTP Italian words. These findings suggest that the HTP sequences may be represented as candidate words, and more broadly, that TP statistics are relevant to word learning. (shrink)

This is the editors' Introduction to a special issue of the journal, Multisensory Research. European philosophers of the modern period found multisensory perception to be impossible because they thought that perceptual ideas are defined by how they are experienced. Under this conception, the individual modalities are determinables of ideas—just as colour is a determinable that embraces red and blue, so also the visual is a determinable that embraces colour and (visually experienced) shape. Since no idea is experienced as, for example, (...) both visual and auditory, there can be no such thing as audiovisual perception. This conception of modality is not directly contested, but a variety of perceptual phenomena are listed that could raise interesting questions if treated as multimodal in origin. (shrink)

Although there has been much discussion regarding shame and guilt, not enough has been said about the complexities of the relationship between the two. In this paper, I examine one way in which I take shame and guilt to interact – namely in cases of so-called “survivor’s guilt” among victims of trauma. More specifically, I argue that survivor’s guilt may represent a kind of response to feelings of shame – one which is centrally tied to the central philosophical notions of (...) autonomy and integrity. (shrink)

Plato articulates a deep perplexity about inquiry in ?Meno's Paradox??the claim that one can inquire neither into what one knows, nor into what one does not know. Although some commentators have wrestled with the paradox itself, many suppose that the paradox of inquiry is special to Plato, arising from peculiarities of the Socratic elenchus or of Platonic epistemology. But there is nothing peculiarly Platonic in this puzzle. For it arises, too, in classical Indian philosophical discussions, where it is formulated with (...) great clarity, and analysed in a way that casts it in a new light. We present three treatments of the puzzle in Indian philosophy, as a way of refining and sharpening our understanding of the paradox, before turning to the most radical of the Indian philosophers to tackle it. The Indian philosophers who are optimistic that the paradox can be resolved appeal to the existence of prior beliefs, and to the resources embedded in language to explain how we can investigate, and so move from ignorance to knowledge. Highlighting this structural feature of inquiry, however, allows the pessimist philosopher to demonstrate that the paradox stands. The incoherence of inquiry is rooted in the very idea of aiming our desires at the unknown. Asking questions and giving answers rests on referential intentions targeting objects in a region of epistemic darkness, and so our ?inquiry sceptic? also finds structurally similar forms of incoherence in the pragmatics of interrogative discourse. (shrink)

In 2010, pitcher Armando Galarraga was denied a perfect game when umpire Jim Joyce called Jason Donald safe at first with two outs in the bottom of the 9th. In the numerous media discussions that followed, Joyce’s ‘blown’ call was commonly referred to as ‘mistaken’, ‘wrong’, or otherwise erroneous. However, this use of language makes some not uncontroversial ontological assumptions. It claims that the fact that a runner is safe or out has nothing to do with the ruling of the (...) umpire himself, but rather with some state of the universe that does not depend on the umpire for its existence. In this paper, I recast the problem as a version of Plato’s Euthyphro Dilemma and argue that the view implied by the above assertions is actually misguided. Instead, I hope to show that an alternative view – what I call ‘restricted umpire voluntarism’ – is actually more in line with the spirit of the game of baseball and is not as counterintuitive as it may appear.. (shrink)

Medieval and early modern devotional works rarely receive serious treatment from philosophers, even those working in the subfields of philosophy of religion or the history of ideas. In this article, I examine one medieval devotional work in particular—the Middle High German image- and verse-program, Christus und die minnende Seele —and I argue that it can plausibly be viewed as a form of medieval public philosophy, one that both exhibited and encouraged philosophical innovation. I address a few objections to my proposal—namely, (...) that CMS is neither public enough nor that it counts as proper philosophy—and I attempt to defend CMS’s public philosophical credentials in light of these objections. I conclude with a brief discussion of how devotional texts like CMS can help us do innovative public philosophy today. (shrink)

This paper employs tools and critiques from analytic feminist scholarship in order to show how particular values commonly on display in analytic theology have served both to marginalize certain voices from the realm of analytic theological debate and to reinforce a particular conception of the divine—one which, despite its historical roots, is not inevitable. I claim that a particular conception of what constitutes a “rational, objective, analytic thinker” often displays certain affinities with those infinite or maximal properties that analytic theologians (...) have taken to be most relevant or essential to their theological conceptions of the divine, and I explore what thinking differently about the former might mean for how we think about the latter and vice versa. (shrink)

From a theoretical standpoint, the problem of human suffering can be understood as one formulation of the classical problem of evil, which calls into question the compatibility of the existence of a perfect God with the extent to which human beings suffer. Philosophical responses to this problem have traditionally been posed in the form of theodicies, or justifications of the divine. In this article, I argue that the theodical approach in analytic philosophy of religion exhibits both morally and epistemically harmful (...) tendencies and that philosophers would do better to shift their perspective from the hypothetical “God’s-eye view” to the standpoint of those who actually suffer. By focusing less on defending the epistemic rationality of religious belief and more on the therapeutic effectiveness of particular imaginings of God with respect to suffering, we can recover, (re)construct, and/or (re)appropriate more virtuous approaches to the individual and collective struggle with the life of faith in the face of suffering. (shrink)

Understanding human beings and their distinctive rational and volitional capacities requires a clear account of such things as reasons, desires, emotions, and motives, and how they combine to produce and explain human behaviour. Maria Alvarez presents a fresh and incisive study of these concepts, centred on reasons and their role in human agency.

Many philosophers think that we can identify, e.g., a weather expert by checking if she has a track record of making accurate weather predictions but that there isn’t an analogous way for laypeople to verify the judgement of a putative moral expert. The weather is an independent check for weather expertise but there is no independent check for moral expertise, and the only way for laypeople to identify moral experts is to engage in first-order moral reasoning of one’s own. But (...) if one can do that, one would not need to rely on a moral expert in the first place. This paper provides an account of Feedback as an independent check for moral expertise in the form of certain positive and negative changes in the lives of advisees after they started acting in accordance with an advisor’s advice whilst nothing else of significance changed in their lives in that period. Given our folk background theories, and some specific information about the advisee’s situation, Feedback suggests that the advisor’s advice was correct. Laypeople would identify moral experts by inferring that the best explanation of the correctness of the advisor’s advice in a high proportion of cases in which she dispensed advice is that the advisor had moral knowledge. Identifying moral experts in this way involves the use of some moral reasoning of one’s own but it is too elementary to make moral experts redundant. (shrink)

While Kierkegaard creates characters who represent various ways of existing as lovers in the aesthetic and the ethical spheres, namely, Johannes the Seducer and Judge William, he does not have a corresponding character for love in the religious sphere. Is there truly only marginal space for romantic love in Kierkegaard’s religious sphere, or did his own personal history prevent him from being able to imagine what that might look like? This paper examines a commonly overlooked discourse, “On the Occasion of (...) a Wedding,” for Kierkegaardian insights on erotic love in the religious sphere. Against understanding erotic love as a moment (in the aesthetic sphere), or a duty (in the ethical sphere), this paper explores how “On the Occasion of a Wedding” recasts erotic love as gift. Kierkegaard stages the “imagined occasion” of a wedding as a phenomenological reduction through which love presents itself with gift‐like characteristics. Respecting the gift‐status of love transforms the lover into a grateful recipient rather than a seducer or a conqueror. This paper concludes that the proper response to love as gift would be neither to refuse it in favor of nihilistic uncertainty nor to possess it through triumphalistic objectivity, but to humbly embrace both its “already” and its “not yet” dimensions. (shrink)

Background There is a need for clearer guidance for pharmacists regarding their responsibilities when selling complementary medicines. A recently published ethical framework provides guidance regarding the specific responsibilities that pharmacists need to meet in order to fulfil their professional obligations and make a positive contribution to health outcomes when selling complementary medicines. Objective Evaluate the acceptability and feasibility of a new ethical framework for the sale of complementary medicines in community pharmacy. Methods Australian community pharmacists were invited to participate in (...) online focus groups and interviews. Participants were recruited via multiple methods, including social media and the professional networks of pharmacy groups. Participants were provided the ethical framework prior to the discussion. Discussions were transcribed verbatim and analysed using thematic analysis. Results Seventeen community pharmacists participated in the study. There was good representation among participants in terms of gender, years of practice, pharmacy location and script volume. Participants differed in how proactive they were in relation to selling and providing advice on complementary medicines, how they interpreted evidence in relation to complementary medicines, and how they navigated their practice within the retail environment of community pharmacy. The majority of participants found the framework was acceptable for practice and was feasible for implementation with targeted support. Participants identified two important areas for targeted support in implementing the framework: improved access to evidence-based information resources on complementary medicines and independent evidence-based education and training on complementary medicine for pharmacists and pharmacy support staff. Conclusion The ethical framework addresses an important gap in providing specific professional guidance to pharmacists when selling complementary medicines. The results of the study suggest that the framework may be acceptable to community pharmacists and be feasible to implement with targeted support. (shrink)

Magnetism is all about creating alignment between your authentic self and your actions. The more aligned we are, the more opportunity, flow, and joy we invite into our lives. We each hold the power to attract the life we want, the one we deserve, the one we dream of. Yet so many of us get stuck in a cycle of self-doubt, insecurities, and old patterns of behavior. Through simple guiding principles, Amber Lyon shows you how to embrace and enhance (...) your own power and magnetism. You Are a Magnet shares powerful magnetic mindset shifts, practical tools, and reflections to help you discover the limitless potential for growth that is at your fingertips. What if you could change your life, simply by changing the way you see it? Through her four-part framework--Alchemizing Fear, Cultivating Courage, The Magnetic Mindsest, and Living Through Joy--you will be gently guided along the journey of seeing your life through new eyes and learning to slign your thoughts and behaviors with your most magnetic self. (shrink)